Jules Mouquet

French composer Jules Mouquet (1867-1946) became a professor of harmony at the Conservatoire de Paris in 1913. He himself had excelled there as a student of Théodore Dubois and Xavier Leroux, winning several prestigious composition prizes, including the Prix de Rome in 1886, the same prize Debussy had won two years before. His Late Romantic style is characteristically French, with fluid chromaticism and modal inflections coloring an essentially Impressionistic soundscape. Mouquet's most-performed work is La Flûte de Pan (Pan's Flute), op. 15, composed in 1906, for flute with either piano or orchestra. Each of the work's three movements is prefaced with a brief poem in French -- these are the lines that precede the first movement, Pan et les bergers (Pan and the Shepherds):